"A lot of people like to force you," Robeson said about drivers. "They get right up close to you so you have to run through."

The intersection sums up the way growth has unfolded near UCF during the past decade: big, fast and poorly planned.

If University of Central Florida's main campus were a city, its 48,000 students — not counting faculty and staff — would make it the second biggest in Orange County.

Bigger than Apopka's population of 44,000.

But students are just the beginning. One study showed 50,000 people work within a 5-mile radius of the university.

And it's still growing.

A new apartment building going up at the intersection of Alafaya and University — where a shopping plaza once stood — will bring 1,316 more student beds, along with 60,000 square feet of retail shops.

Another 894 student beds are going up not far away on East Colonial Drive, just east of Rouse Road.

It's the same old Florida growth story playing out at lightning speed. Build fast to meet market demand. Pay little mind to transportation. Fix problems later.

The planning geniuses can't even muster up something as simple as shade trees along University Boulevard to make the walk a little less brutal.

"It's the prototypical example of urban sprawl," said Jim Sellen, a longtime Central Florida planner and principal with planning, design and engineering firm VHB. "There's no attempt to soften that area. Cars live there. That's what it's about. It's auto-centric."

If students were tourists, maybe they would qualify for a pedestrian bridge like the one Orange County agreed to build for Universal Orlando last year.

And even if you're OK with the car obsession, there aren't enough thoroughfares to take pressure off University, Alafaya and Colonial.

McCulloch Road, which serves as the Orange-Seminole county line and the northern border of the campus, would be an ideal road to divert some of the pressure. But it dead-ends at the Little Econ River and beyond that, already developed subdivisions.

"We don't have enough arterial roads," Sellen said. "Colonial is broken. In the morning during peak hours, people are sitting there through two or three phases of lights."

He says there's a stark difference between the piecemeal development around UCF and the kind of long-range planning that went into Horizons West, sandwiched between Walt Disney World and Windermere in west Orange County.

"We said something is going to happen out there; let's do something better than sprawl," Sellen said. "Contrast that with the east side. We built a beltway. We built a university ... because we haven't done that forward thinking, we're going to suffer with it."

Orange County oversees the land surrounding the UCF campus, and Fred Kittinger, associate vice president for university relations, says UCF doesn't attempt to shape private development near its borders.

But the university has made a bigger effort to communicate with its neighbors. The building of Bright House Networks Stadium in 2007 led to a permanent committee of homeowners and landowners who meet with UCF officials several times a year.

UCF points out that new on-campus housing projects have helped keep cars off the road in the area. So does a fleet of 40 UCF shuttle buses that logged 2 million trips last year.

And as more students have rented homes in nearby suburban neighborhoods, UCF has even tried to help them fit in with their older and HOA-compliant neighbors.

The university printed a handy brochure full of tips such as, "Avoid leaving indoor furniture outdoors" and "Stay off your roof."

But good growth in east Orange County goes beyond student-suburban dweller diplomacy.

County government and state transportation officials need to step up with pedestrian bridges, and perhaps dedicated lanes for express buses on big roads such as Colonial.